Taipei Original Festival

The Taipei Children’s Arts Festival was first launched in 2000. Since then, the annual festival that regularly held on summer vacation has been widely popular among families and children in Taipei.

Each year, the festival features an average of 50 free-entry theatrical works, arts exhibitions and workshops with an average of 200,000 participants annually.

Its popularity has made the festival a must-visit for families with children at greater Taipei area.

To further promote long-term development of performing arts in Taipei, the festival has been organized by the Taipei Culture Foundation since 2007.

Each year, the festival has introduced local and international high quality performances for the benefit of Taipei children.

The high quality exhibitions and performances have proven extremely popular among locals. Taipei Children's Art Festival passports that allow its holders access to all festival shows sell like a hot cake each year. All the tickets are also highly popular. The workshops have attracted visitors from outside Taipei and even from southern Taiwan.

Its long time popularity has shown that Taipei Children’s Arts Festival is here to stay and a strong force that has successfully integrated aesthetics into daily live.

Taipei Children’s Arts Festival Stories from the past nourish the world of today. Today's actions determine what future generations can have and what they will have to face. While the world may be imperfect, at the same time it is full of poetic beauty and fun.

The Taipei Children's Arts Festival is a widely anticipated event that is held every summer in the city. Families queue up for tickets, eager to enter the imaginative world created by both Taiwanese and foreign art troupes. Each year, the festival chooses a different theme for the audience to take as a starting point for adventure. By enjoying the wide selection of programs, participants will be able to experience the close relationship between art and life and choose the most creative philosophy for living.

This year, one of the international troupes is Australia’s Terrapin Puppet Theatre, who use an unique interactive mode to create a story and bring the various parts of a city on stage with the help of the audience. Their work “I Think I Can” is an interactive installation that places miniature model railway layouts in public spaces. The puppet operators and story editors then collect the story ideas from participating audience members and unfold the urban adventure in the miniature theater.

“For this year’s festival we’re hoping for more audience involvement,” said TCAF Executive Director Liu Li-ting. Some artists will bring behind-the-scenes creative processes onto the stage, while others will offer audiences the opportunity to actively explore the performance. It is expected that these different ways of telling stories will help audiences experience the charm of performance art by participating with both their bodies and minds.

International programs this year include “Love That Dog”, an adaptation from prize-winning teen fiction, which was turned into a vivid reality poem. Presented by the Dutch Theater Groep Kwatta, the show tells the story of a boy falling in love with poetry and using it to explore his untold feelings. This down-to-earth and heart-warming story is full of surprises, as small items such as dolls and real-time images help to turn the text into objects.

In Irish artist Paul Curley’s enticing work “Bake!”, an urgent attempt to bake a birthday cake for a prince causes dramatic disarray. Curley will invite the audience to create fun out of chaos as they complete the mission together.The homegrown show “One And Only”, produced jointly by the Tainaner Ensemble and TCAF, is another such example. The performance features dozens of handmade wooden puppets, each of which represents a child with its own unique personality. Liao Jo-han, the show’s director, explained: “The rotating axle resembles a lively child, while clapping hands represent mischief... Apart from looking at the wooden technological installations, you can also witness their poetic imagination.”

Other highlights include the wildly imaginative “Buchettino”, co-produced by TCAF and Italy’s Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, which uses sound effects to guide the audience through a dark fairytale world. Though this is the fifth consecutive year the unconventional show has come to the stage, it still remains one of the most sought-after tickets at TCAF.Official website: http: //eng.taipeicaf.org/